AI By the time Rory found the first standing stone, the moon had vanished.
It had been above the trees a moment ago, a thin white hook snagged in the winter branches. Then she stepped between two ancient oaks, ducked beneath a limb furred with moss, and the sky closed over as neatly as a lid.
She stopped.
Behind her, Richmond Park stretched away in familiar darkness: wet bracken, bare trees, the pale ribbon of the footpath. Farther off, London stained the low clouds orange. She could hear traffic beyond the park walls, softened by distance to the steady hush of the sea.
Ahead stood a slab of blackened oak twice her height.
It looked like timber until she touched it. Stone met her fingertips, cold and faintly ridged, preserving every whorl of bark. Lichen silvered its surface. A second pillar leaned among the trees twenty feet farther on, then a third beyond that, forming a crooked procession into the dark.
The Heartstone pendant shifted beneath her coat.
Rory pulled off one glove and drew it out by its silver chain. The crimson gem rested against her palm, no bigger than her thumbnail. Its faint inner glow deepened as she watched.
Warmth pulsed into her skin.
Once.
Twice.
Like a slow, sleeping heart.
“Well,” she whispered. “That’s not ominous at all.”
Her voice fell dead at her feet.
She looked back again. The path remained visible. So did the gap beneath the mossy branch. She had marked the turning on her phone and tied a strip of red paper around the nearest sapling, not because she believed the stories about people walking into Richmond Park and losing three days, but because she believed in taking precautions when following anonymous instructions into woodland at midnight.
The message had been pushed under the door of her flat above Silas’ bar that afternoon. Heavy cream paper. No envelope. No fingerprints she could see, though that proved nothing.
MIDNIGHT. ENTER BY THE OAK BOUNDARY.
BRING WHAT DYMAS GAVE YOU.
COME ALONE IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY IT CHOSE YOU.
The handwriting had been thin and upright. The word DYMAS meant nothing to her. The implication that the pendant had chosen her meant rather more.
She should have shown the note to someone. She knew that. Cool-headed did not mean stupid, whatever Eva occasionally claimed. But sharing it would have required explaining the pendant, the impossible warmth it gave off near certain locked doors and abandoned tunnels, and the figure Rory had glimpsed twice in the reflection of the Golden Empress delivery scooter’s mirrors—a tall shape that wasn’t there when she turned around.
Besides, whoever had sent the note knew where she lived.
That had made staying home feel no safer than coming.
Rory slipped the Heartstone back beneath her jumper and stepped past the first pillar.
The traffic noise stopped.
Not faded. Stopped.
The silence that replaced it had texture. It pressed against her ears, thick as deep water. Her next breath sounded embarrassingly loud. Even the soft scrape of her coat sleeve seemed intrusive .
She turned at once.
The path behind her was gone .
The oaks remained, but their trunks had crowded together. Ferns spread over the ground in glossy black fans. There was no red strip tied to any sapling. No orange London sky shone between the branches. Above her, stars glittered in unfamiliar swarms.
Rory stood very still.
Panic presented itself as a series of practical observations. No path. No signal, probably. Unknown terrain. Unknown distance. Unknown mechanism.
She took out her phone.
11:58 p.m.
No service.
The compass app spun without settling, its red needle sweeping circles as if delighted with itself.
“Fine.”
The word travelled farther than her first whisper . It slid between the trees and came back diminished.
Fine.
Rory lifted her torch. Its beam picked out the next standing stone, then another. Beyond them, pale flowers trembled in the darkness.
There was no wind.
She could go back and waste time testing a boundary she could no longer identify, or she could follow the only visible markers toward whatever had brought her here. Neither option was good. One, at least, had information at the end of it.
She went forward.
The stones curved left, leading down a slope that should not have existed. Richmond Park had hollows and rises, but this dipped steeply enough to hide the forest behind walls of earth. Roots gripped the banks like exposed fingers. Wildflowers bloomed between them in impossible profusion—bluebells, foxgloves, primroses, tiny white stars she did not know. Spring and summer crowded together beneath winter branches.
Their colours looked wrong under the torch. Too rich. Too wet.
The Heartstone pulsed against her sternum with every tenth step.
Rory counted.
By sixty, she noticed another set of footfalls.
She stopped at seventy-three.
The sound behind her stopped at seventy-four.
Not an echo . An echo did not take one more step.
She angled the torch back along the trail.
The beam reached the nearest pillar and broke around it. Nothing moved. The flowers stood perfectly upright. A cluster of foxgloves tilted toward her, their bell-shaped mouths dark.
“Hello?”
No answer.
Then, very far away, a child laughed.
Rory’s fingers tightened around the torch.
The laugh came again, faint and breathless, somewhere ahead now. It was followed by the squeal of a swing chain and the hollow thud of small shoes striking packed earth.
There were no playgrounds in this part of the park. None close enough to hear.
She resumed walking. Slower this time.
At ninety-one steps, the footfalls returned.
At ninety-two, something crossed between two trees to her right.
Rory swung the light toward it. The beam caught a white trunk, a curtain of ivy, and a low branch rocking gently up and down.
Still no wind.
She did not call out again.
The slope levelled without warning. One moment she was picking her way between roots; the next, her boot sank ankle-deep into soft grass. The forest opened.
The grove lay in a round clearing bordered by the black oak stones. Moonlight poured down, though Rory could not see the moon. It silvered waist-high grasses and year-round wildflowers, each blossom turned toward the clearing’s centre.
There, a shallow pool reflected a sky full of stars.
Rory remained beneath the trees.
The note had said enter by the oak boundary. It had not said where to go after that. No one waited beside the pool. No lantern burned. No mysterious benefactor emerged with a tidy explanation and a cup of tea.
Her phone read 11:58 p.m.
The seconds were changing. The minute was not.
She watched the display until twenty-three seconds had passed. The time remained 11:58.
“No,” she said softly .
Something answered from across the clearing.
“No.”
It used her voice.
Not an echo this time either. The word came back with her Cardiff edges sharpened, spoken by someone close enough to imitate the movement of her tongue.
Rory killed the torch.
Darkness swallowed the trees, but moonlight still painted the grove. She crouched beside the nearest standing stone, placing its bulk between herself and the opposite side. Her pulse hammered harder than the pendant.
She listened.
Grass whispered.
One narrow track appeared through the flowers, stems bending in sequence from the far boundary toward the pool. Whatever made the trail did not rise above them.
Rory held her breath.
The bending flowers reached the water and stopped.
A ripple spread across the pool.
Then another.
The reflected stars shuddered.
Rory eased her phone into her pocket and searched the ground with her bare hand. Damp grass. Moss. A fallen branch, too rotten to serve as much of a weapon. Her fingers closed around a stone with a sharp edge. Pathetic, but solid.
The pool stilled.
In its reflection, someone stood behind her.
Rory did not turn.
The figure was only a distortion in the water, long and dark, its head inclined over her shoulder. Straight black hair brushed its shoulders. A pale oval marked its face.
Her face.
The reflected Rory lifted one hand.
The real Rory did not.
A small crescent scar gleamed on the reflection’s left wrist.
Cold moved through her in a clean, paralysing line.
She shut her eyes.
The trick was to refuse the image. Reflections could lie. Fear could lie. Adrenaline made patterns where there were none. She knew these things. She also knew there had been nothing behind her a moment before, and that knowledge lived lower than reason, in the old part of the body that understood teeth in darkness.
The Heartstone flared hot.
Rory gasped and tore it from beneath her clothes. Crimson light spilled through her fingers, bright enough to stain her skin.
Behind her, something inhaled.
The breath was slow and intimate. It smelled of pond water and crushed flowers.
Rory moved before it could exhale.
She threw herself sideways, rolled through the grass, and came up facing the stone. Nothing stood where she had crouched. No figure. No flattened grass.
Her own breath rasped in her throat.
Across the pool, a woman watched her.
She had Rory’s height and Rory’s straight black hair. She wore Rory’s coat, down to the frayed seam on the left pocket. Her face remained in shadow despite the moonlight, but her eyes shone bright blue.
The double smiled.
Rory felt it before she saw it: the pendant’s heat climbing toward pain.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The woman’s head tilted.
“Who are you?”
It was Rory’s voice stripped of cadence, each word placed carefully beside the next.
“You sent the note?”
“You sent the note?”
“Right. Productive.”
“Right.” The smile widened. “Productive.”
Rory backed toward the trees. She kept the Heartstone clenched in one fist and the sharp rock in the other. The double did not follow. It stood amid the flowers with its arms hanging loose.
At the clearing’s edge, the standing stones appeared closer together than before . There had been gaps broad enough for a person. Now the nearest barely admitted a shoulder.
Rory looked for the route she had entered by.
Every opening showed the same thing: dense forest, silver flowers, blackness.
The double spoke behind her.
“Rory.”
She froze.
The voice had changed. Not much, but enough . The counterfeit flatness was gone . This was her own voice as she heard it in recordings, lower than it sounded inside her skull.
“Rory, wait.”
She glanced back.
The woman stood at the near edge of the pool.
No ripples disturbed the water. Rory had not heard her walk.
“I know why it chose you,” the double said.
The sentence landed harder than any scream could have done.
Rory forced her attention to the gaps between the stones. “Then tell me.”
“It was hungry.”
The pendant pulsed .
Across the clearing, flowers began closing one by one.
“It was lost,” the double continued. “It called for a door.”
Another pulse .
A dull red gleam appeared among the trees beyond the boundary. Then another. Then dozens, all at different heights.
Rory stared before she could stop herself.
Eyes, her mind supplied.
But they did not blink.
The crimson points brightened in answer to the Heartstone. Between them, the darkness shifted with the slow movement of bodies too large to pass through the trees.
A low sound rolled through the grove.
Not a growl. Not thunder.
Knocking.
Three measured blows, vast and distant, as if someone stood beneath the earth and struck the underside of it.
The pool quivered . The ancient oak stones gave a soft collective creak.
Rory’s double looked toward the sound. For the first time, her smile faltered.
That frightened Rory more than anything else.
“What’s beneath us?” Rory asked.
The double turned its blue eyes back to her.
“Not beneath.”
The knocking came again.
This time it sounded from the sky.
The stars in the pool went out.
Rory looked up. Darkness spread overhead in a perfect circle, erasing the unfamiliar constellations. Along its rim burned a thin crimson line, the colour of the Heartstone’s inner glow.
A portal.
The pendant had always warmed near them. Near locked cellar doors. Near bricked tunnels. Near places where the air smelled briefly of ash.
Now it scorched her palm.
Rory wrapped the silver chain around her fist and ran.
She chose the narrowest gap between the standing stones, turning sideways to force herself through. Rough stone scraped her coat. Something caught her hair. For one horrible second the pillars seemed to flex inward, bark ridges pressing her ribs, but she expelled her breath and tore free.
The forest received her.
Branches whipped her face. Flowers crushed under her boots with wet sighs. She did not search for the path. She followed the Heartstone’s pulse in reverse, changing direction whenever its heat intensified, choosing the colder way.
Behind her, her own voice called from the grove.
“Rory!”
She ran.
“You’ll miss it!”
A branch struck her left wrist, scraping across the old crescent scar.
“You came to know!”
The footfalls returned. Not one set now. Many. Some too light, pattering over leaves. Some heavy enough to tremble through the soil. All kept pace behind her without drawing closer.
Rory counted because counting made the world measurable.
Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.
The child’s laugh burst beside her ear.
She stumbled, caught herself against a tree, and nearly dropped the pendant. When she looked down, a small handprint darkened the moss at knee height.
Fresh water trickled from it.
Forty-one.
She pushed on.
The forest changed around her. Bare winter limbs became dense summer canopy, then skeletal branches again. Once she saw dawn ahead, grey and thin between the trunks. She ran toward it and found only a bank of white flowers, every bloom bearing a tiny closed eye at its centre.
She turned away before they opened.
The knocking continued overhead.
At sixty, her phone began to ring.
The sound was deafening in the unnatural hush. She dragged it from her pocket without slowing. The screen showed an incoming call from her own number.
She rejected it.
It rang again.
Her own name glowed on the screen: AURORA CARTER.
She rejected it and switched the phone off.
The black display lit anyway.
A live image filled the screen.
Rory saw herself running through the trees from several yards behind. Her black hair snapped across her face. Her coat flared with each stride.
Behind the filmed version of her, something tall leaned into the frame.
Rory dropped the phone.
It struck the ground and continued ringing.
She did not look back.
At seventy-three steps, she saw the first standing stone.
At seventy-four, the footsteps stopped.
Rory almost stopped with them. Instead she sprinted toward the black pillar. Beyond it hung the mossy branch she remembered. Through the gap beneath, London’s orange glow smudged the clouds.
The red paper strip fluttered from the sapling.
She threw herself across the boundary.
Sound crashed over her. Traffic. Wind. The drone of an aeroplane. A fox barking somewhere in the park. Rory fell to her knees on the footpath, palms striking wet gravel.
The Heartstone went cold.
For several seconds she stayed there, gulping ordinary London air. Rain had begun, fine and needling. It ticked against leaves and darkened the shoulders of her coat.
Her watch read 12:01 a.m.
Three minutes.
Rory rose unsteadily and turned.
The mossy branch swayed in the wind. Behind it lay familiar bracken and a shallow stand of oaks. No ancient boundary stones. No impossible flowers.
Her phone rested in the mud at her feet.
She stared at it.
She had dropped it deep inside the grove.
The screen was cracked but dark. After a moment it chimed with a missed-call notification.
One missed call from Aurora Carter.
A voicemail waited.
Rory did not touch it. She backed away, one step, then another.
From the phone’s speaker came the soft click of the voicemail playing by itself.
At first there was only breathing .
Then her own voice whispered, warm with relief and very close to the microphone.
“I got out.”
Rory’s gaze lifted to the trees.
Between two trunks, just beyond the reach of London’s light, a pair of bright blue eyes opened.
The voicemail continued.
“But you didn’t.”